“Monism”: oneness, of a unified nature, rejecting the dualisms that plague our modern world. Gone is the distinction between science and myth, tradition and modernity, mind and body, progress and stasis, human and nature. Granted, it’s a lofty, far-from-tangible idea that can trace its roots to different strands of religion and philosophy, from Spinoza to Hindu philosophy, from all around the world, appropriated now for various uses.
One such application is that of Indonesia filmmaker Riar Rizaldi’s most recent film, Monisme, which takes the focal point of Mount Merapi — a highly active volcano on Java — and crafts a sort of monism of thought and experience around it by using both documentary and fictional elements. The film most recently screened in the New Asian Cinema competition of the 2024 Five Flavours Asian Film Festival in Warsaw, taking home the Grand Prix (top prize). Previously, it had also collected Golden Hanowan Award in the main competition of the 2023 Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, the Best Feature Film Prize at the 2023 Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, and competed in the 2023 Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille (FIDMarseille) and the 2023 Singapore International Film Festival. (In an eerie but fitting metatextual twist, Merapi last erupted in December 2023, just months after the film premiered.)
Monisme might best be described as a cinematic meditation that avoids straying too far into the experimental or essayistic. Opening with forest killing of a farmer carried out by several men, the film moves into footage of eruptions with billowing smoke, stills of seismic data recorded on paper (in a sort of Latourian fashion, where life is “created” through scientific “documentation”), and sequences of scientists investigating and trying to forecast the volcano’s next big eruption. The film’s combination of vastly different elements is the most inventive aspect, as it at no point feels tonally or stylistically disorienting. Rizaldi speaks also to the sheer intensity of Merapi’s power, suggesting the possibility of a world extinction-level event. Its sequences centred around science and conventionally defined “progress” are soberingly still, cast in a more true-to-life colour palette as construction vehicles move huge blocks of rock.
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A late-film scene depicts what is shown to be part-ritual and part-performance, bathed in red light, bodies tumbling across the ground and also flogged: “Nature is God and God is nature,” chants a growling voice. A storytelling sequence further takes on the spiritual sides of Merapi, which bears significance for the local Javanese communities: it “can be perceived similar to a monarchy.” The volcano is not just an empirical, material volcano, but also reflects an immaterial “royal palace” where “volcanic activity is fundamental to maintain the balance of nature.” Whereas science is fixated on measuring, quantifying, and depicting, tradition isn’t concerned about why or when an eruption is going to happen. Rizaldi thus creatively shows two vastly different perspectives on the same phenomena, encouraging us to think in whole rather than in parts. Two scientists are also taken and assaulted when they wander into the forest intent on taking measurements — their government-approved permits don’t mean anything in this context.
However, Rizaldi’s film is no pure and simple allegory of science and myth battling it out on the ground. Mining activity of Merapi’s sand and sediment also worries city environmentalists, but, as one worker says, “If we quit mining, we’ll die starving.” A series of “interviews” with local miners — which play as the most faux-documentary aspects of the film — and candid interactions reveal the precarity and exploitation occurring in the mining communities around Merapi, where an interconnected ecosystem of low-level corruption and turf warfare thrives, paid off by the state. A large explosion could potentially wipe out the lifeblood of these communities, something belief won’t be able to see coming.
Monisme’s component parts work together like its titular concept, weaving together many different mythologies — encompassing both “science” and “myth” — around Merapi to create a whole that’s not necessarily cohesive, but at least no longer split violently into its component parts. At times, it can become less than conventionally accessible, but the filmmaker isn’t there to provide an easy narrative. He presents many questions without answers, stirring together a stew of things that are clearly interconnected, even if it is hard to tell at first. Several recent films have dove headfirst into this filmmaking approach centred around one particular concept, object, or phenomena, but Rizaldi has impressively overcome many of the stumbling books that make them too lecture-like, confusing, or scattered.
